{"id":33,"date":"2008-03-08T17:46:59","date_gmt":"2008-03-09T01:46:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/?p=33"},"modified":"2008-07-07T00:27:04","modified_gmt":"2008-07-07T07:27:04","slug":"unfriending-the-st","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/unfriending-the-st\/","title":{"rendered":"unfriending the ST"},"content":{"rendered":"

facebook<\/a>, myspace<\/a>, etc. etc. have introduced a new cultural phenomenon that I’ve yet to come to grips with : the “removal” of friends from your life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the real world, the concept is fairly vague.\u00a0 People make friends in stages and steps and the lose them in a similar manner.\u00a0 People move, lives change, you interact and intersect with these people less and less until you no-longer really consider them friends.\u00a0 However, you never formally declare that friendship over-and-done.\u00a0 There’s no need, it’s just understood.<\/p>\n

Now that we have websites where we specifically list all of our friends, one by one, we have introduced the dilemma of when to remove <\/em>someone as a friend.\u00a0\u00a0In most cases,\u00a0online friend connections\u00a0languish\u00a0even when the friendship has long since faded away.\u00a0 They are the Langoliers<\/a>\u00a0of web friendships.\u00a0 Sometimes you remove someone because they were only tangentially your friend : someone you met at a party once but never talked to again, a boyfriend or girlfriend of a friend that they’ve long since broken up with, etc.\u00a0 But, in general, it’s not a big deal because it’s likely to not even be noticed that the connection was severed.<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0when someone has\u00a0ticked you off, when they’ve been so heinous that they no longer deserve to be linked to your life there comes the decision of whether to completely cut online ties and clicking that box that sends them into the virtual trashbin.\u00a0 I’ve had to face the hard version of this decision twice in the past year… the second time being today.<\/p>\n

Was ST that bad?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 We had a wonderful friendship at one point, one that\u00a0I will remember as one of the most inspiring and rewarding that I’ve had\u00a0in my life.\u00a0 It is exactly that overwhelmingly great value\u00a0I discovered in that friendship\u00a0that\u00a0makes it so hard to let go of.\u00a0\u00a0But the relationship, the friendship, rapidly spiralled into oblivion in a painful torrent of miscommunication and misunderstanding that cannot undergo love’s recovery<\/a>.\u00a0 And today it was formally declared that there’s no point in\u00a0continuing a friendship between us.\u00a0 We are\u00a0two people who have lost reciprocal faith in the other person’s actions and words being motivated by the open and honest expression of care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As silly as it sounds,\u00a0it is\u00a0time to unfreind ST.\u00a0 Isn’t it enough just to say goodbye in person?\u00a0 Instead, I have to click a prompt declaring that “yes, I really do want to remove this person as a friend”.\u00a0 Thank you, digital world, for adding another\u00a0(slight)\u00a0layer of complexity to our personal lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

facebook, myspace, etc. etc. have introduced a new cultural phenomenon that I’ve yet to come to grips with : the “removal” of friends from your life.\u00a0 In the real world, the concept is fairly vague.\u00a0 People make friends in stages and steps and the lose them in a similar manner.\u00a0 People move, lives change, you … Continue reading unfriending the ST<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[33,17,99,21,100],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-personal","tag-facebook","tag-hearts-and-thoughts","tag-st","tag-this-modern-life","tag-unfriending"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}